I just have to say one thing, the reason we put people in a tiny capsule and launched them to the moon, was because we had already built the launch vehicle for other purposes (read, ICBM), if we weren't afraid of an all-out nuclear holocaust with Russia, we would never have invested such money in a "publicity stunt" like that!!!

Technically, only Mercury and Gemini launched on rockets based on Army or Air Force missiles--which I think is one of the finer swords-into-plowshares moments in our history. The Saturn V had no such heritage.

Wasn't the saturn 5 also one of the direct products of the germans the us took, who honed their skills making rockets in the war? So even then, still the result of military research.

If it's true that "non-government entities will never back comparable efforts", then that should tell you something.

If people don't want to put their resources for such projects (they prefer consumption or shorter-term or lower-risk research and development), then a representative government *should not* tax them to fund projects preferred by a few.

I disagree.By people you mean investors. The only entities capable of funding something like a moon landing are governments or a pool of wealthy investors. However, investors are for motivated by profits on their investments and are more interested in less risky short-term investments for a quick profit. Governments are not motivated by greed and can afford to invest decades into a project without immediate results.

I invested in Liquid Metal and if I could I would invest in a US company that is actively designing-engineering, building and selling Thorium Reactors, where are those so called private companies with real money like Apple, Exxon, and Boeing trying to make happen. To sure once one company does it the me too's will come, but not before.

It seems as though the vast majority of readers missed the point of Tyson's speech: An investment in science now makes possible the technological progress that keeps us ahead of other countries. Scientific investment, alongside basic educational investment, ensures future economic potential by giving more people a chance to contribute, who would otherwise become high school dropouts. This is what Politicians seem to have forgotten. If you slash and burn everything that doesn't have to do with military or social welfare, you end up with a country of poorly educated people who can't keep pace with countries like China who have a long-term plan to overtake the U.S. as the world's leading power. When that happens, it's not going to be good for us.

The proximity of Stanford University, San Jose State, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Lawrence Livermore Labs, plus a state government at the time that was welling and several companies made a lot of things possible in northern California after WWII, collapsing schools or infrastructure isn't good long term it's like Apple giving 137 billion dollars to Wall Street.

But it goes without saying Dr. Sagan uber alles. A little thing like death cannot overshadow his influence. Surely he is in a betterr place now.

You obviously didn't know his bio. He's an atheist.

You obviously didn't know his bio. He once said:"An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed."

A lack of belief is not belief in a lack.

Carl is being nice and polite like Neil, Obama, or Brian Cox. Billy Graham or Pat Roberson are not polite or tolerant.

It's pretty obvious stuff. Of course we should be investing, heavily. The market is terrible at this kind of stuff - look at the lack of vital antibiotics verses the multiple ways for 60 year olds to get an erection.

The lack of new antibiotics is mostly because we've spent most of the arrows that were on the quiver. Bacteria have developed resistance and it's getting harder and hard to find compounds that work on an angle (biological pathway/attack surface) that we haven't bred bacteria to survive already.

Now, if you compare malaria treatments and erectile dysfunction, I agree wholeheartedly.

Basic or applied research could get us much more. Imagine having a small implant close to your immune system's breeding grounds. The implant is connected wirelessly (through near field) to a (tightly controlled and strongly authenticated) communications device that tells it what proteins or molecule chains to synthesize. Then seed this thing, like a computer antivirus does, with the data to be PROACTIVE about creating defenses. Like real-time vaccines. There's only one system in the world that's more susceptible to viruses and other infections than an animal's body, and that is a PC. And still, the Antivirus model works there. Given the much slower rate of infections in the human world (limited by the need for physical interactions) this model could work fantastically well and keep you protected from every single pathogen out there. Of course, such a (somewhat scary, granted) solution would require decades of research and given that it is unlikely that it could be made proprietary, government funding. Twenty or thirty years from now I'm convinced this thing will be out there and we will all be perfectly protected from any possible infection. Now the question is, will it be Chinese?

*sigh* What happened to the America that said, "Fuck it, we're going to the moon!" and just went and did it? There was no, "the payoff will take decades" in that. Just, "we're going. Science, figure out how to get us there" and it happened. And so did all the technology that came out of it. Research for the sake of research is a hard sell. So you found the Higgs Boson? Great and what does that do for me today?

Your last sentence exactly illustrates the problem Tyson is trying to overcome, large scale research doesn't have benefits today or even tomorrow it has benefits 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now. When they first discovered quantum physics back in 1920 I'm pretty sure many people said so what, what does that do for me now but as Tyson said now a 3rd of our economy relies on it and many of the fancy tech we use all the time does as well. This is exactly why he is looking to government to fund the research because they need to do the work that society won't. Businesses are general way too short term focused to be involved at that level of research.

If it's true that "non-government entities will never back comparable efforts", then that should tell you something.

If people don't want to put their resources for such projects (they prefer consumption or shorter-term or lower-risk research and development), then a representative government *should not* tax them to fund projects preferred by a few.

I disagree.By people you mean investors. The only entities capable of funding something like a moon landing are governments or a pool of wealthy investors. However, investors are for motivated by profits on their investments and are more interested in less risky short-term investments for a quick profit. Governments are not motivated by greed and can afford to invest decades into a project without immediate results.

I just have to say one thing, the reason we put people in a tiny capsule and launched them to the moon, was because we had already built the launch vehicle for other purposes (read, ICBM), if we weren't afraid of an all-out nuclear holocaust with Russia, we would never have invested such money in a "publicity stunt" like that!!!

Technically, only Mercury and Gemini launched on rockets based on Army or Air Force missiles--which I think is one of the finer swords-into-plowshares moments in our history. The Saturn V had no such heritage.

Wasn't the saturn 5 also one of the direct products of the germans the us took, who honed their skills making rockets in the war? So even then, still the result of military research.

Direct product, no. My amateur-space-historian understanding is that its engines dated to an Air Force request for a launch vehicle--not an ICBM, which would never need to be that big.

You certainly can trace common threads back to the V2, but that in turn owed a debt to the prior research of Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth. And both of them seem to have been far more interested in spaceflight than war.

I just have to say one thing, the reason we put people in a tiny capsule and launched them to the moon, was because we had already built the launch vehicle for other purposes (read, ICBM), if we weren't afraid of an all-out nuclear holocaust with Russia, we would never have invested such money in a "publicity stunt" like that!!!

Technically, only Mercury and Gemini launched on rockets based on Army or Air Force missiles--which I think is one of the finer swords-into-plowshares moments in our history. The Saturn V had no such heritage.

Wasn't the saturn 5 also one of the direct products of the germans the us took, who honed their skills making rockets in the war? So even then, still the result of military research.

Direct product, no. My amateur-space-historian understanding is that its engines dated to an Air Force request for a launch vehicle--not an ICBM, which would never need to be that big.

You certainly can trace common threads back to the V2, but that in turn owed a debt to the prior research of Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth. And both of them seem to have been far more interested in spaceflight than war.

V-2 Rocket: It was the progenitor of all modern rockets,[6] including those used by the United States and Soviet Union's space programs. During the aftermath of World War II the American, Soviet and British governments all gained access to the V-2's technical designs as well as the actual German scientists responsible for creating the rockets, via Operation Paperclip, Operation Osoaviakhim and Operation Backfire respectively.[7]

Saturn V: The origins of the Saturn V rocket begin with the US government choosing Wernher von Braun to be one of about seven hundred German scientists in Operation Paperclip, a program created by President Truman in September 1946.[citation needed] It was intended to bring these scientists and their expertise to the United States, thereby giving America an edge in the Cold War.Von Braun was put into the rocket design division of the Army due to his direct involvement in the creation of the V-2 rocket.[3] Between 1945 and 1958, his work was restricted to conveying the ideas and methods behind the V-2 to the American engineers.[citation needed] Despite Von Braun's many articles on the future of space rocketry, the US Government continued funding Air Force and Naval rocket programs to test their Vanguard missiles despite numerous costly failures. It was not until the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik atop an R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of carrying a thermonuclear warhead to the US,[4] [5] that the Army and the government started taking serious steps towards putting Americans in space.[6] Finally, they turned to von Braun and his team, who during these years created and experimented with the Jupiter series of rockets. The Juno I was the rocket that launched the first American satellite in January 1958, and part of the last-ditch plan for NACA (the predecessor of NASA) to get its foot in the Space Race.[7] The Jupiter series was one more step in von Braun's journey to the Saturn V, later calling that first series "an infant Saturn".[6]

Redstone (rocket family) (Jupiter and Juno rockets): Juno I was a derivative of the Jupiter-C, used to launch the first American satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958. Although the U.S. possibly could have put a satellite into orbit before the Soviet Union had the ABMA been allowed to attempt a satellite launch in August 1956, the Eisenhower administration wanted the first U.S. satellite to be launched by a civilian-developed rocket instead of a military missile derivative.The Vanguard rocket was being developed for this purpose, so the administration ordered ABMA's research director, Wernher von Braun, not to attempt any satellite launches. The Vanguard rocket failed on the first attempt to launch the Vanguard satellite in December 1957, crashing back to the pad and exploding. The administration then turned to the Army, and the ABMA and von Braun were asked to launch a backup satellite as soon as possible.

*shrug* I'm not a historian by any means, just trying to piece together the history from wikipedia. Sounds like the designer of the V-2 (Von Braun) went on to be directly responsible for the saturn series, though there was an failed attempt to use civilian tech instead of the military tech? But at the same time, it sounds like the vanguard missiles were military tech as well, just navy and air force instead of army, so I dunno.

F-1 (Rocket Engine): The F-1 was originally developed by Rocketdyne to meet a 1955 US Air Force requirement for a very large rocket engine. The eventual result of that requirement was two different engines, the E-1 and the much larger F-1. The E-1, although successfully tested in static firing, was quickly seen as a technological dead-end and was abandoned for the larger, more powerful F-1. The Air Force eventually halted development of the F-1 because of a perceived lack of requirement for such a large engine. However, the recently created National Aeronautics and Space Administration appreciated the usefulness of an engine with so much power and contracted Rocketdyne to complete its development. Test firings of F-1 components had been performed as early as 1957. The first static firing of a full stage developmental F-1 was performed in March 1959.

@m56That was pretty much my point in a nutshell. Von Braun, and others, who were responsible for various MILITARY rocketry programs, first in Germany and then the US, were directly responsible for the Saturn V. All of their knowledge and experience was from military WEAPONS projects, and then it was applied directly to space projects (which also double as weapons platforms; the other poster's assertion that you'd never need something like the saturn v for a weapon's launch platform is just silly, since if you have it, you can use it -- it's a launch platform, what you launch with it is entirely arbitrary.)